Founders at Work.pdf

310 Founders at Work
Heinemeier Hansson: I was working with 37signals as a contractor while I was
finishing my bachelor’s degree. They did the design and I did the programming.
After a few years, it became clear that they needed a tool to manage the client
project process. One person wouldn’t know what the other was doing. It was
pretty disorganized and starting to look unprofessional.
The idea came to us that blogging had been a pretty good way of distributing
information between people. I had been blogging personally on Loud
Thinking and 37signals had Signal vs. Noise. So we wondered, what would happen
if you took that blogging idea and applied it to project management?
That was how we got started: the project blog was the first part of Basecamp
that was made. We got it up in about a month and then we started using it to
manage Basecamp itself. So it became self-contained very quickly in the sense
that we were using Basecamp to build Basecamp.
As we showed it to colleagues in the industry, we quickly realized that
others had the same problem; there was not a lot of software available for small
companies to manage projects. Microsoft Project and the other heavyweight
approaches to this relied on critical path management and things that might
work fine for a 200-person project on a construction site, but not well for 3 people
trying to deliver a web application.
So we started out just thinking, “This is going to help us solve our consultancy
needs.” And as we got more feedback, we realized it was a good time to
start thinking about how we could make this 37signals’s product.
Livingston: Do you remember the moment?
Heinemeier Hansson: It was more just a flow of the application coming
together and the feedback we started to get from people we respected saying,
“I want this too!” We thought, “This is something that it would be selfish to
keep to ourselves.”
Livingston: What were the features that people liked most when they saw it?
Heinemeier Hansson: The funny thing is that most people were impressed by
all the stuff Basecamp didn’t do. They were used to these big, honking products
that tried to do everything, where they just needed something simple.
We had this dilemma that either you had MS Project or you had email, and
there’s a huge gap between them. Managing a project by sending emails back
and forth is messy and doesn’t work, but otherwise you had to adapt your
process to what’s mandated from these other heavyweight applications.
Basecamp was basically just trying to be one step above email. And by setting
such a humble goal, we had to make a lot of decisions about how simple we
could make things. We tried to make less software from the very beginning. It’s
one of the mantras we have. It’s a win whenever we can get away with just a
simple model, since we have to do less programming. I was the only programmer
and I was dedicating 10 hours a week to this, while we were developing it.
37signals was paying me to do this out of its consultancy revenue, since we
didn’t have funds to fund it. So we had only a quarter of a programmer dedicated
to the development and no funds really for doing this. The designers